Fairytales Flashcards
Fairytales as Socializing Narratives
They teach us how to be with one another, they are moral tales that teach us about right/wrong, what behaviours should be punished/rewarded, they represent an ideal world that is always shifting and also portray a sense of beauty norms.
Fairytales are mercurial…
Mercurial means the fairytale is pliable, shifting, changing constantly.
Cultural Pedagogy
“Education takes place in a variety of social sites including but not limited to schooling” concerns the study & practice of how best to teach, in this case teaching cultural/societal norms
Girl Power (as seen in Shrek - Marshall and Sensoy)
Fiona speaks her mind, is physically strong and practices martial arts however these are all used to keep her man – exerting power in light of sexual competition. Also emphasizes Western values like individualism that may not be applicable to non-white girls.
Fiona as anti-Cinderella
Replaces the weak princess with a strong girl, she’s not perfectly beautiful but she is goodhearted and less ladylike, challenges the traditional lessons of femininity
Discourse (Marshall and Sensoy)
refers to a collection of shared ideas, or shared knowledge about a particular topic. In other words, discourses of gender refer to the ways that we talk about or otherwise understand gender. As a concept, “discourse” implies that how we talk about things (i.e., gender) is not simply descriptive and that what we know about things (i.e., femininity and masculinity) is not necessarily “true”. What we say about gender actually produces what we know about gender. Discourses produce truth, or, put another way, discourses produce the appearance of truth. Gender, then, doesn’t exist autonomously somewhere in the word, but rather is produced as an effect of discourse.
Heterosexual Girlhood
- Mass produced fantasies for girls (Disney) that represent womanhood, show young girls how to be a woman, idealize the transformation
- The world of the Disney heroine is a world that girls all over North America are encouraged to relate to
- Why does Cinderella love the prince? They dance a few times but never have conversations, love at first sight, Heroine begins as a young girl who is persecuted, unloved who ends up a women who has a prince charming
Heterosexual Closure
story is tied up with a monogamous marriage: ex: ending of sex and the city: these women have the whole world open to them and they choose marriage
Jill Birnie Heinke’s perspective on Cinderella & Disney
Disney heroines follow ‘typical heterosexual narratives in which the perfect girls destiny is a monogamous relationship with a (white, handsome, successful, powerful) ma
“Frustrating Mixture”
Marshall and Sensoy ask us to look at Fiona as a “frustrating mixture” - she’s not a solution, the best, a perfect representation of womanhood: there are things about her that are empowering/progressive but she is also similar to the other princesses
Main Point of “The Same Old Hocus-Pocus” by Marshall & Sensoy
Despite the perception and appearance of Shrek as a radical shift in representation of women & men, what we see is still essentially “new” feminine roles still based in heteronormativity
Films as pedagogical texts
Provides normative discourses of gender and sexuality circulated under the guise of ‘girl power.’ The film as a “teaching machine” or producer of culture not just entertainment: attempts to disrupt cultural scripts through humour/parody and are positioned as challenging mainstream discourses while simultaneously reproducing normative ideas in new ways
–> Shrek is a pedagogical text cloaked in entertainment
